Posted
by
michaelon Wednesday September 01, 2004 @05:40PM
from the no-popups dept.

mpeach writes "Mozilla Organization has launched its new Web site and it's looking a fair bit sleeker than it used to. No new product releases to go with the new look unfortunately, but, according to the Firefox 1.0 Roadmap, release candidates of the latest browser are getting closer by the day."

Last night our champion hackers got a new update infrastructure landed into Firefox 0.9 branch builds and set up the new server and the new server-side code, moving away from the slow Java based stuff to some much faster not-Java based stuff. Grab today's branch builds and go hammer on this new stuff. Update should be working better and everything should be faster, hopefully.

why is the latest version of firefox so hard to find for windows? all the download links are for gnu/linux! (or is this new page so "smart" that it detects what OS you are on and only print a link for that?)

I guess navigator.platform is independent of UA string. What doesn't make sense is why they use userAgent for OSX.

What also doesn't make sense is why they used client-side Javascript for the rotating screenshot image, when they're already doing server-side scripting to include the latest RSS information, or why they have the screenshot as the background image for a DIV instead of an inline IMG.

On the contrary, placing images with CSS is extremely useful, especially for excluding images from print versions or providing pages that degrade to nothing but the most basic layout (the way the new Mozilla site does). Positioning can also be a lot easier this way.

Personally, I think it's much more elegant than a bunch of inline floated or, god forbid, align="right"ed image tags.

THAT is the issue web developers have been fighting for a long time. If you want a browser that will render line noise, go for MSIE. Of course, this only encourages bad coding (see the decline of HTML quality since 99 or so....)

I'd say HTML coding's gone up in quality, not down. Aside from a few errant copies of FrontPage floating around (you know who you are), the introduction of the stricter-formatted XHTML has given quality-concious designers something they can put faith in.

Instead of malformed tables possibly breaking the whole page, XHTML means that the page HAS to be formatted correctly, and with that, it damned well better work with all the browsers out there. The more strict standard makes less guesswork for HTML tool dev

If we're talking about 1 programming language and 1 interpreter, this is ok (I'm a perl fan myself). But since we're talking about scores of browsers from different makers in different countries, the standards should be adhered to.

Besides, real programming languages have enough built in intelligence (scoping, flow control structures, etc) to make some assumptions. Basic HTML does not.

It's a huge problem for me as well! Firefox renders/.'s IT section in an absolutely putrid color scheme spawned from at least the 9th circle of hell. I wish those lazy developers over at mozilla.org would actually get around to fixing some bugs instead of just working on a slick web presence that looks incredibly tight and professional.

Firefox 0.9.3, and all others before it, on my WinXP machine, have had the same problem - sometimes the text renders too far to the left overlapping the side menu. This is a well known problem. A quick refresh fixes the rendering, so it is not a big deal. But you would think that by now, so close to 1.0, such an obvious problem would have been taken care of.

From what I've heard, it's a problem with Slashdot's noncompliant HTML, not a Firefox problem. However, since/. seems unwilling to actually do anything about it (apparently the editors don't use the actual site enough to care), the Mozilla people are trying to work around it.

I'm glad that the creative designers behind the firefox look finally got a crack at the homepage. IMO it gives the browser much better more credibility if it has a professional looking website. Not just like some hodge-podge browser.
*warning... blatant plug to get me free stuff following

That article looks very suspicious. I'm amazed that it's written by someone 'credible' like wired. The whole thing reads like an advertisement. It doesn't say one bad word about it. How do you know that everyone who 'got' an iPod isn't a plant?

Anyone with an IQ above 60 must realise that this scheme is not sustainable in the larger scale (not that I even think it's sustainable on the smaller scale). But what's that you say? It doesn't matter as long as you're at the top of the scheme. These things rely on

The new design isn't a poor excuse to show off CSS positioning effects, it uses them to it's advantage. Everything joe blogs needs is clear to show, anything else is much more clearly displayed due to the lack of clutter.

Sorta OT, is anyone else irritated with how they are hiding the zipped binaries for windows now? You used to be able to get them as easily as the installer, and before that there was no installer.
I just don't trust it...

Frankly, I am not much worried about that, because I am sure the distros will take care of packaging it nicely to avoid these kinds of problems.

What worries me though is that very old and critical bugs like Bug 115174 are not considered important enough as to be release blockers. For the lazy to look this up, this bug manifests in realoading a dynamically generated page in certain cases, which may result in double-charging your credit card when you have just made a purchase and simply want to save your receipt. This bug is present in both Mozilla and Firefox and has been an issue since 2002!

I have been using Mozilla and Firefox exclusively for the past couple of years and have to say that this is a PITA. I got used to it and know which sites I regularly visit are problematic and how to get around it (save as text or print to file). But a lot of users might get hit by this bug if Firefox becomes more widespread and they would rightfully be pissed.

Another problem I have is that since about version 1.3 (or earlier?), Mozilla, and later Firefox, have been unstable and crashing a lot (e.g. once or twice a week under heavy load). I don't know is this is a Linux-only issue (I only use Red Hat 9 and Fedora core 2), but they seem to have a memory leak and that's not good if it creeps into the 1.0 release. I would gladly submit a bug report for this if I only knew how to reproduce it...

I, for one, think they have made some great UI improvements. Most people don't hit moz.org seeking news and whatnot about the project. Instead, they just want to know where to get The Better Browser(TM). More than once, I've had to hold a few slower-than-I'd-like hands in finding where to download the latest and greatest version of Moz and variants. I just wonder why they featured FireFox so prominently and put the full version of Moz in the "bottom" row.

Honestly. Mozilla includes everything and the kitchen sink. That's overkill for most users. As the Gnome folks learned the hard way a few good options are much more welcome than every little tidbit of configurability.

Firefox is lean, fast forward, and one tool for the job. Just what mom needs. And what I need. The features can be added with extensions, if you really have to. Most people love Firefox from day one because they "get it".

Mozillas default interface also resembles the old Netscape Navigator interface wich feels kinda old to the people that switched over to IE back in 1996.

Despite the zeal with which Firefox advocates push it, I still prefer Mozilla. I don't like Firefox. It lacks features I use like encrypted password storage and it's buggier than Mozilla. I've tried every milestone since 0.6 and it still hasn't won me over.

I use Firefox as my primary browser, and I'm equally confused as to why it suddenly has centre stage. It's not ready for primetime. The current release version has got a half-assed incomplete default theme, there are still problems upgrading from version to version, there's still filler text where there should be text that is actually useful... it's not a finished product. That's why it isn't 1.0 yet.

Seeing as 1.0 is not too far away, why couldn't they have postponed pu

Firefox is perfectly ready for prime time, both for geeks who understand what a 0.x version is, and for Windows users who are accustomed to the remarkably woeful IE, and general incompleteness of most Microsoft products when they first ship. Firefox may not be perfectly polished yet, but it's certainly able to compete with Internet Explorer, and with other offerings like Opera which are intimidating to first-time users because of their complexity.

If you click on the "Products" tab, you'll see the link for Camino. I'm assuming they've decided to include the big three products on the main page and relegate the lesser requested ones (like Camino & Bugzilla) to the Products tab to lessen confusion for newcomers.

Just out of curiosity, what does Camino give you that Firefox doesn't?

Ok, this is bordering on infatuation. "Mozilla Organization has launched its new Web site and it's looking a fair bit sleeker than it used to. No new product releases to go with the new look" This is
effectively saying we looked at 500 submissions and this was the best of them.

Slow news day or infatuated with Mozilla? Heck, I like Mozilla and use it at home and work, but I don't drop everything to see what's happened with their website in the last day. Gee willikers.

Here's some other fine articles which could probably have been posted:

While I don't agree with most of your post, I do agree that this item didn't really deserve its own article. The problem is that we don't get Quickies anymore. Remember those? One article that referred to several small items, all worthy of a nerd's attention but not important enough to warrant their own separate articles. For some reason, we don't see those anymore. I thought they were quite fun. A lot of fun's been taken out of/. lately...:(

how Firefox is being plugged. It's pretty obvious IMHO from the site that Firefox has the wind in its sails so to speak, as it's offered for download (geared to your OS, nice) with a biggo font. If you want Mozilla, you have some more clicks to go. Does that mean that Mozilla will be superseded at some point by Firefox??

and really why not: lighter, faster and just as good if not better. firefox tries to be what most people seem to be looking from mozilla anyways: a good web browser(very few use the extra stuff in the 'full' mozilla anyways and if they're available as seperate in the future there's no problem there either).

# Focus development efforts on the new standalone applications: the browser currently code-named Firefox, the Mozilla Thunderbird mail/news application, and standalone composer and other apps based on the the new XUL toolkit used by Firefox and Thunderbird. We aim to make Firefox and Thunderbird our premier products.

# Updated: Maintain the SeaMonkey application suite, currently built by default, for enterprises and other organizations with large existing Mozilla deployments. SeaMonkey remains an important product for many customers.

Downloads geared to your user agent is a stupid idea. Any Linux user probably already has Firefox, so the only reason they'd be going to the website would be to download the Windows version for family/friends.

It takes 4 clicks for a Linux user to download the Windows version from the front page now, compared to 1 click for the old version. Generally everything has been dumbed down, and is more ugly looking. This new design sucks.

They shouldn't be using "Free download" as the prominent eye-catching link. "Free download" does not mean the software is free, only that it costs nothing to download it. This semantic fuzziness is often used by commercial software vendors (and spammers) as a way to entice people to download trial and/or crippled software. They should instead say something like "Free software", "Free to get, free to use", anything that doesn't have the bad vibe that comes with "free download"

OK, so this is off topic. But I just tried the new MSN music site and some of the buttons (like search) don't work in FireFox. What a piece of crap. I'm going back to IE. (just kidding, about going back that is. The search button really is DOA).

If you've been to mozilla.org recently, make sure you refresh once or twice. I discovered an odd-looking page when I followed the link, and I was sure that the designers must have gone crazy. Turns out that my browser (Firefox) was using a cached version of their old CSS file and was applying it to the content of the new site. Yuck. Refreshing fixed this.

I think the site looks beautiful. Clean, slick graphics. The old site made great use of CSS, but the color scheme here is a lot more likeable. And

Looks nice, And valid [w3.org] too!--Slashdot only allows a user with your karma to post 2 times per day (more or less, depending on moderation). You've already shared your thoughts with us that many times. Take a breather, and come back and see us in 24 hours or so.-I'm still posting:-)

I wish the Firefox page had easy front-page links to both the Extensions list [texturizer.net] and the Plug-ins list [mozdev.org]. Maybe I missed the link, but the most convenient way I know to find the plug-ins is through a search engine. Does anyone know why extensions and plug-ins have to have separate pages?

It seems the website knows what system I'm running, as they offer for me to download the OS X version of Firefox, yet the screenshot of it to the right shows the Windows version. It'd be nice if they tailored this page to me a bit more and showed a screenshot with OS X chrome.

All I can say is wow, this is a great change, almost too great! I came here this morning looking for the latest nightly build, I saw the new design and almost had a heart attack, I thought I had mistyped the URL or something!

I think the new design gives it much more of a professional look, which is good, I think it will attract more people, and overall be better for there company.

The blue look deffinatly looks professional. Regarding the old design, something about all that red made me see red:P

Dear $deity in heaven, why would they screw up a perfectly good feature like find as you type?

Insult to injury was when typing in passwords to my Novell server, the new find bar proudly displayed my password in plain view. Thank the same $deity no one was around, and my monitor faces a wall.

Why didn't they just add a Clippy type character that can speak through the voice software in windows:"It looks like you are typing in "$password" as your password, would you like some help typing in your passwords?"

Does anyone know how well Firefox integrates with Thunderbird? Specifically, if I click on a "mailto" link in Firefox, will it pull up Thuderbird without any custom configuration (assuming Thunderbird is installed)?

Last I looked into this, Firefox and Thunderbird would not work together like this "out of the box". This was a real bummer, and it made me wonder if Firefox wasn't being targeted a little too much at the geek community. Compared to the simple integration of IE and Outlook Express, the Firefox/Thunderbird integration was really clumsy.

(On a side note, it kinda irritates me that Firefox is being pushed so hard over Mozilla. I've had a few clients download Firefox (thinking it was a Mozilla update), and then wonder why they couldn't get to their email program anymore when it replaced all of the Mozilla icons...)

Like the topic says, in IE I get 'Error: Object Expected'. If the site is broken in the browser people are going to be using to look at the site for the first time, what are people going to think about the browser Mozilla wants you to use?

In all of the Mozilla browsers, on XP SP2 at work and OSX at home, Slashdot overwrites the lefthand "menus" and the main section text - about a fifth of the time. Usually a re-load will fix it. This is present in Mozilla, Firefox, and Camino.

Its actually a lot better looking if you right-click>customize>use small icons. I thought I'd be busy downloading themes, but the ugly default theme is actually pretty handsome and useable when using "small icons."